WASHINGTON – In the blink of an eye, you could miss it – that scene in “The Bourne Supremacy” when Jason Bourne delivers a lightning-quick beat-down to a U.S. consulate official in Naples, then grabs the man’s PDA, manipulates its micro-motherboard and drives off listening to the man on this 21st century wiretap. And in the latest film, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” wiretapping is the very deed that drives the frenetic plot.

In these types of adrenaline-pumping portrayals of electronic eavesdropping, reality must step aside so Bourne (when he’s not crashing a car) or “24’s” Jack Bauer (when he’s not torturing someone) can eavesdrop in real time, real fast. And it’s always for the good, you see, because Bourne’s gotta find out what sinister spook programmed him to be a stone-cold killer and Bauer’s gotta save the world. The ends justify the means. No time for questions.

Wiretapping thus becomes swashbuckling and romantic, as if it were a national security technique to be deployed whenever necessary, without hindrance, by those supremely smart, exceptionally gifted and oh-so-moral people who walk the proverbial wall protecting our freedom from certain demise.

It’s a far cry from the reality of wiretapping – so routine, so tedious, like watching dripping water. Old-school wiretapping was captured most perfectly in “The Lives of Others,” last year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, about surveillance by Stasi agents of the former East Germany: the long hours listening to conversations as a reel of tape wound round and round. Those were the days when “wiretap” meant using alligator clips to literally tap into a phone wire.

And today? Who would want to sit and watch National Security Agency supercomputers intercept voice data from millions of phone calls coursing through fiber optic cables? Don’t all rush to the multiplex at once.

It’s the kind of wiretapping depicted in “The Bourne Ultimatum.” “We intercepted a call in London. Key word “blackbriar,’ ” a CIA agent says in the movie. Though individual wiretaps remain prevalent, so too is the collection and analysis of massive amounts of voice data.

The legality of that tapping is being debated by politicians and privacy experts, especially since President Bush signed off on legislation recently that expands the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

Civil liberties advocates are up in arms about the law – and also more than a bit concerned about depictions of bugging and wiretapping on the big screen (and the small one). Watching wiretapping, Hollywood-style, has become so scintillating that some people fear we are being inured to the potentially sinister and abusive side of its uses.

Take “24,” where nothing gets done without wiretapping, computer hacking, torture and killing. The show and its depictions of torture are particular peeves of civil libertarians (and a general and some military interrogators who complained to the show’s creators about it, the New Yorker wrote in February).

Lisa Graves, deputy director of the nonprofit Center for National Security Studies, says there’s something pernicious about the show’s premise. “It assumes that they always have the bad guy, that they’re never wrong,” she says.

Graves has stopped watching “24.”

“I don’t want to spend any more of my time than necessary being immersed in the indoctrination of this culture of the ready use of torture and surveillance in the violation of the rule of law,” Graves said.

Sometimes, though, it is the bad guys in film who use the wires. “Enemy of the State” (1998), for instance, had Will Smith as a target of a rogue intelligence official trying to shut him up.

Real life has been equally sinister when it comes to wiretapping. Remember Cointelpro, that massive FBI surveillance program of 1956-71 aimed at suppressing dissident voices? One target was Martin Luther King Jr.

These days, the debate about surveillance is complicated by the blurring of the line between public and private.

Cameras are on us when we shop, bank, drive, gather to protest. Willing partakers of Web culture splay their personal details across the Internet. Anyone can take a photo any time and send it almost anywhere. Surveillance even has become entertainment, called reality TV. We like to watch, even to be watched, at least when we volunteer for it.

Technology, 9/11 and the politics of the war on terror have shifted the paradigm on privacy, for better or worse. Perhaps that is why Americans have not been howling about the possible intrusion of wiretapping into their telephone use.

“You don’t necessarily have the sense, when you see Jack Bauer, that it’s wrong,” said Barry Carter, a Georgetown law professor. Back in the 1970s, Carter investigated widespread NSA phone wiretapping and reading of telegrams as part of the Church Committee’s probe of intelligence abuses. (The committee was named for its chairman, Democratic Sen. Frank Church, of Idaho.)

Back then, “it was accepted that it was wrong that these things were being done,” he says.

Today, the mass interception of telephone calls is defended by the Bush administration as a necessary tool against terrorism while opponents decry it as a dangerous encroachment on our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure.

And polls suggest some people accept that intrusion as the price of security.

In a June poll by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, respondents were split – 48 percent, yes; 48 percent, no – on whether the government, in its fight against terrorism, is doing enough to protect the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. And last year, when a Washington Post-ABC News poll asked if the FBI should continue to be authorized to wiretap people, surveil them and obtain records as part of the fight against terrorism, 62 percent of respondents said such authority should continue, while 37 percent said it should not.

Paul Levinson, chairman of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York, believes people have come to expect that their right to privacy is different from in the past.

“Not that we think it’s OK, but we’ve come to look at our environment as having perpetually open ears to everything that we’re saying,” Levinson said. “I think the genie is out of the bottle.”

And what precisely is “the genie”?

“The genie is the lowest level of privacy that human beings have had in their history,” Levinson said. “We just have to get used to it. It’s a question of redefining what our public and private lives are.”

Tony Soprano knew the difference; rarely did he conduct “family” business on the phone. What wiretapping couldn’t do, however, a plain old wire could. When Soprano found out his lieutenant had worn a wire for the feds, he sent him to sleep with the fishes.

Soprano’s character was modeled on Ruggiero “Richie the Boot” Boiardo, the head of a New Jersey crew of the Genovese crime family who was taken down by wiretapped evidence in the 1960s.

Art imitates life.

But is that a good thing? We raise the question because of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who back in June reportedly went to great lengths to defend Jack Bauer. (Scalia was unavailable for comment.)

At a legal conference in Ottawa, responding to another participant who warned against asking, “What would Jack Bauer do?,” Scalia mounted a spirited defense, saying, “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” The Globe and Mail of Canada reported on the event.

Scalia then apparently hammered at the legal conundrum of prosecuting the likes of Bauer:

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him?”

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